


The next time around

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 19:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the ten months that Sarah leaves and doesn’t take Kira with her, on Wednesdays, when Mrs. S. teaches her neighborhood self-defense class, Felix picks Kira up from school and walks her home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The next time around

**Author's Note:**

> No archive warnings, but alludes to in-canon abusive relationship and abandonment.

For the ten months that Sarah leaves and doesn’t take Kira with her, on Wednesdays, when Mrs. S. teaches her neighborhood self-defense class, Felix picks Kira up from school and walks her home.

The first time, Kira looks up at him with those great big, dark, serious eyes, but she doesn’t say anything. Felix can feel Kira’s teacher’s eyes on him, and he doesn’t think he’s imagining the suspicion there, but Siobhan had called the school earlier in the day to say he’d be there, and he’s one of Kira’s emergency contacts, for christ’s sake. 

“Hey there, monkey,” he says to Kira, and holds out a hand to her. She takes it without hesitating, though she still doesn’t say a word. “Say goodbye to your teacher, love,” Felix tells her, more because it feels polite than because he particularly cares if the woman gets her allotted number of salutations from the under-10 set.

Kira waves with the hand that isn’t holding Felix’s, so Felix holds out his own other hand to the teacher to shake, introducing himself as, “Kira’s uncle, Felix. I’ll be fetching her home Wednesdays for the time being.” He’d be more specific if he had any idea how to be. It’s impossible to predict what Sarah is going to do, though, and Felix decided long ago that it was better not to try.

Once they’re out of the gates of the schoolyard, Felix stops, turns to Kira, and crouches down to her eye-level. She’s always been a quiet kid, but not like this. _She misses her mother_ Felix thinks, with a pang, and a flash of the anger at Sarah’s leaving that he thought had burned away to embers when they were teenagers flashes through his mind.

“Are you alright, monkey?” he tries. She only nods wordlessly, though.

He tries again, “She’ll be back, Kira. She always is.” Always has been in the past, anyway, and there’s no indication that this time will be any different, Felix tells himself, determined. Well, no indication except for the smudgy-dark bruise across her cheekbone the last time Felix saw her. He’d covered it over with concealer when she’d asked him to, but he’d also offered to stab Vic through the heart for her. He doesn’t think it’s why she left, but she’d been shaky when she went out the door of the loft, and she hadn’t gone on to pick up Kira like she’d said she would, and Felix can’t help but wonder if part of the problem is that he’d said the wrong thing.

“You promise?” Kira asks him, and he wishes desperately that she’d asked him anything else in the world, even almost wishes she’d stayed eerily quiet, because lying to this little girl has never been an option he’s been willing to consider, but he’s not sure he can promise anything at all about what Sarah will do. It would tear his heart to shreds to let Kira think she might not come back, though.

“She always does,” Felix repeats. She does. She has since she started running off and staying out and away all night when he was twelve or so, and she’d climb back in some nights through his window, because it had the better tree next to it, and then fall asleep beside him instead of making her way back to her own room. Flyaway hair and adolescent acne, light, whistling snores when she fell fast enough asleep. Murmured “Missed you, Fee,” and cold hands gripping his tight and brief before pulling back. Felix’s sister.

There are no trees growing outside his loft, these days, but still he’s woken up every night this week to imagined noises of Sarah climbing in his window. “She’ll come back,” Felix tells Sarah’s daughter.

Kira nods like that settles it, takes his hand back, and turns purposefully to walk towards home. After half a block, she looks up at him and tells him, “We got to go to the art room and use real easels in art today, Uncle Felix. Like yours.”

“Oh, yeah? And what did you paint today, love?” he asks her, and feels something like contentment begin to spread through his chest as she prattles on about how they’d gotten to try watercolors today, but she can’t make anything look right with those, and watercolors always look sad anyway.

“I never could get the hang of watercolors either,” he tells her, “But I don’t think we’re missing much. They’re far too wishy-washy for people of our dramatic sensibilities.”

…

Siobhan will take care of Kira, Felix doesn’t worry about that, and honestly, even though she shouldn’t have left, Sarah is probably right not to worry about it, either. Siobhan is good at taking care of people even when she doesn’t like them, and anyone with eyes can see how she adores Kira.

What Felix worries about, because he has been fundamentally on Sarah’s team since he was five years old, and even when he’s not sure what she’s doing should be forgiven, he doesn’t know how to be any other way, is that after Kira has lived too long with Mrs. S., Sarah won’t have a relationship with her daughter to come back to.

Right and wrong are almost beside the point with Sarah, who has always been a force of nature. Felix tries to explain this to Kira, the second week he walks her home. “It’s not that she doesn’t love you, and miss you,” he tells her, because it’s _true_ , he’s never seen her love anything or anyone the way she loves Kira, “She just doesn’t show she cares about us in the way that most people do. It’s not fair to you,” he says, looking down at the fair-dark head of curls, the little hand in his, because it’s _not_ , “But it’s still important.”

Kira looks up at him and says, “I know,” and “I could have not have a mummy at all, like you and mum did,” and where does she even come up with this shit? Felix is certain it can’t be normal. His niece is a precocious little genius, and he should remember that more often.

“That’s true, monkey. And I know she’d never have left if she wasn’t sure that Mrs. S. and I would take good care of you. But it’s still okay to be mad at her, it’s still not a very nice thing to do.”

Kira nods, and she looks so solemn that Felix feels out of his depth—she is taking his words to heart, and what if they’re not the right ones?

The day after Kira was born, Felix had sat beside Sarah’s bed in the hospital hours after Mrs. S. had gone home, watching her watch her daughter, and he’d never seen her so still. He’d thought, in a detached way, that he should be feeling a little abandoned now, Sarah’s focus and Sarah’s energy and Sarah’s love had clearly just been redirected for now and for always towards the tiny person in her arms.

He can’t begrudge her that, though, not when he feels the same kind of wonder, looking at this little face that belongs to an alive person who didn’t exist at all just months ago. This little person who came from Sarah but wasn’t Sarah, who had never lived the life Sarah had lived, and would grow up with a completely different set of experiences. Experiences Felix could help shape, he could try to steer her towards the good ones. It was a terrifying thought.

Sarah must have been thinking something similar, because she’d looked up at Felix and said, “I want her to be strong like you, Fee. I don’t want her to have to, but—I’d worry less about her, I think, if I knew she could take care of herself like you do.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Felix had told her, certain in that moment that the concern for this little girl who doesn’t have a name yet was not something that would ever be quieted.

“No,” Sarah had agreed, “Probably not. But it might help.”

Felix hadn't known what to say then like he doesn’t know what to say now, but then, he’d answered Sarah’s, “Will you help me raise my daughter right, Fee?” with a smile, with an “Of course,” with an infinitely gentle finger tracing the line of the tiny eyebrow on Kira’s sleeping face, and finally with the secret promise to himself that where Sarah falls down, he will hold Kira up, she will have no reason to have to be anything like him if she doesn’t want to be.

Now, he shamelessly bribes Kira with Hershey’s kisses on Wednesday walks home, with fancier art supplies than any six year old has any need for, and with stories of Sarah during their childhood—the good ones, that don’t involve cops called or Sarah’s long absences or anyone’s blood except that of whoever got in her way.

Felix thinks of badly covered bruises on Sarah’s wrist and the way she never loved happily in her life until Kira came along, and he feels certain that, in some probably-twisted way, Sarah is probably trying to do the right, or at least the less wrong thing for Kira.

If Kira can't have her mother with her, Felix will give her the nearest he can manage until Sarah makes it home. Sarah is the only person he has ever tried to be like, back when he was young enough that he still wanted to be anyone but precisely and exactly, self-consciously himself. If he can’t do it, no one can.


End file.
